I am pleased to announce the first ever Spherewide Short Story Symposium! As you may know, I enjoy writing short stories and I think the short story format is underappreciated. Shakespeare suggested that brevity is the soul of wit, and the short story's strengths all stem from that central principle: it's short!
Anyone can write a short story. If you think about it, every time we talk to our friends and tell them about something funny that happened to us on the way to work, we're telling a short story. Every story that's worth telling can be told in short story form -- indeed, many books could be improved by cutting out the excess dross.
You are all invited to submit a short story to the Spherewide Short Story Symposium. There won't be any judging, per se, but as the name of the event suggests, I would love to foster discussions about the stories that are submitted.
How to enter: Simply write a short story and send me the link (mw at mwilliams dot info, include "[S4]" in the subject, please). Write about anything you want, fact or fiction, but preferably submit something that hasn't been previously published. I'll take submissions for a week, ending next Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003, and then publish a set of links to all the stories I've received. If the response looks like it will be particularly strong, I will set up an MT blog for hosting the stories and for facilitating discussion.
Tell your friends! And if you're considering writing a story, don't get discouraged if you don't think the quality level of your writing is "good enough". The purpose of this exercise is to take an hour and write something for the fun of it.
Great concept!
Ah'll be bock!
That sounds like an awesome idea! It will force me to finish one of the shorts that I begin and then leave lying around, collecting virtual dust in my hard drive.
A question: when you mean previously published, you mean on the Web or in an anthology kind of thing?
Well, I've already accepted one story that was previously published on real paper... so....
Ideally, the stories would be new; the purpose of S4 is to encourage people to read and write short stories. But hey, I'm not going to complain too strongly if you want to submit something you wrote before and think is really good. It'll be a wider audience for your story (perhaps), and added material for S4, at the very least.
I've already posted a few short stories on my blog, but I'll try to rattle out a new one in time for the (gulp) deadline tomorrow. Just found out about this. My readers know I'm a playa!